The other great thing I’ll do when I have abs someday is have the kind of relationship to food that pretty much everyone universally agrees is relaxed, healthy, correct, and makes me a lot of fun to be around at mealtime. Whenever someone spontaneously suggests going to IHOP after a wonderful, electric evening of surprising connections that’s fostered the beginning of several new and unlikely friendships, I’ll always offer to drive. Not because I need to be the one who drives. I never get weird when someone else drives, I’m just ready to drive because I own my own car and always remember to renew my license on time. When we get there, to IHOP or some rough equivalent, because I’m equally comfortable at chain restaurants that remind me of all my less-than-genteel Midwestern roots as well as upscale diners with, like, fresh lemon-ricotta variations, I’ll eat whatever number of pancakes is neither ostentatiously over-the-top nor pointedly less than what everyone else is eating. I’ll just really enjoy whatever number of pancakes sounds good to me, and I’ll stop eating when I’m full. My relationship to pancakes isn’t punitive, doesn’t require denial or the language of guilt, and is never followed up by a trip to the gym; food is something more than fuel but something less than an obsession with me. I don’t have a compulsive need to finish whatever’s in front of me. (Not that I’m a food waster!) It’ll be such a relief, just being around me as I eat a meal, like a temporary reprieve from the politics of food and the internal pressure to be constantly body-positive.
I’ll also cover the whole bill!!! Not in a way that suggests I’m trying to avoid the slow and challenging work of establishing meaningful intimacy over time, nor in a way that sets off any alarm bells about neurotic spending, and definitely not in a way that makes it seem like I’m trying to establish any kind of relational superiority with money. “It’s just pancakes,” I’ll say. “It’s twenty dollars for the whole bill, it’s not a big deal!!! It’s just a bunch of warm bread, I’m only doing this because it’s the cheapest way to treat!!! Relax, I’ve got it!!! Don’t you dare try to pay me back! Fine, buy me a coffee the next time we see each other, if it’s so important to you,” because while I’ll definitely be generous I’ll have no interest in establishing dominance through check-grabbing, so I’ll be equally comfortable being treated as I am treating others.
When I have abs someday, I’ll still have plenty of time to dedicate to my work, because I’m incapable of being distracted by my own abs. I value them but they’re not my highest priority. “His art seems better, somehow,” people will say. “Since he got abs, I mean. I don’t really know how to explain it, because he definitely hasn’t changed as a result of getting abs. Making abs? Having abs? He hasn’t changed at all because of his abs, but at the same time it’s undeniably true that his art is both intangibly but demonstrably suppler these days, and it all happened around the same time. He’s the same but also better.”
“Art?” someone else might ask. “I thought he was a writer.”
“Oh, it’s all art,” people will respond. “His writing is definitely art now, if it wasn’t art before. He’s an artist, definitely. And obviously it’s not that the abs have improved his art, because if he stopped having abs tomorrow I know it would still be just as good. The abs have had both no effect on him and also elevated the excellent things about him that were already there, simultaneously.”
When I have abs someday, even though I’ll barely notice my own abs, I certainly won’t irritate people by performatively not noticing my own abs. I’ll have so thoroughly and casually conquered both any residual female-pattern body image issues and all my new male-pattern body image issues that I’ll be able to walk through walls, but I won’t, because I’ll respect what the walls were put in place to protect. I’ll pay attention to only the meaningful, character-building aspects of gender dysphoria (not that I support the further medicalization of transition access by wanting to give credence to the idea of gender dysphoria, I just use it as an easy form of shorthand, but only around people who already intuitively understand the broad collection of impulses/desires/needs I’m referring to when I use the phrase) and never use transition as an excuse to start indulging in self-loathing, or as justification for mistreating myself on the basis of garden-variety insecurities, or as a basis to neglect my spiritual health or the well-being of the communities around me in order to chase after fleeting physical goals. And my genitals? Why, terrific. Just terrific, thanks for asking.
“Thanks for saying something nice about my abs,” I’ll say, when you invariably say something nice about my abs. In a very real way, the fact that I’ve developed abs for the very first time after the age of thirty-five will feel just like you have developed abs, and also simultaneously like you have freed yourself from the desire to chase abs instead of learn to tend to and nurture your body as a secret garden. “That really means a lot to me and my abs.”
And you’ll know we both really mean it.
CHAPTER 20 Paul and Second Timothy: The Transmasculine Epistles
From Paul, who was bowled over in the street by God and never complained, to Timothy, my dearly beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace. You headline my prayers, night and day, and I call to mind our transmasculine ancestors before addressing God directly, in gratitude and praise; greatly desiring to see you that I might be joyful again.
When I call to remembrance the root and the rock of faith within you, which you got from your grandmother Lois and your mother, Eunice, inasmuch as in your transition you have not attempted to divest yourself of what you have inherited from women. What good dwells in them, I am persuaded, dwells in thee also. Within thee, I should clarify! Looks-wise, you’re so masc it makes my teeth hurt, but you’ve simultaneously managed to completely avoid any sort of performative, self-conscious masculinity, as God has not given us a spirit of anxiety but of power, and love, and of sound mind, that you need not be ashamed of me or of being weirdly religious sometimes. And as we have been called with a holy calling, not according to our own designs but according to his own purposes, which was given to us in Christ who transitioned before the world began (it is a cliché to say Christ transitioned as we have transitioned, and yet our own transitions were prefigured in his), wherefore I have been appointed a preacher, and an apostle, and a teacher.
Wherefore, if I’m honest, I have also been appointed suffering. But I’m not embarrassed by it—at least not beyond the standard, as the natural transmasculine condition is one of embarrassment—and neither should you be. Hold fast to the form of the sound words of faith and love we last exchanged with one another, that good thing that was committed to you by the Holy Ghost, and all of our friends with long names who are not afraid to greet us in public. Onesiphorus, for example. (I told him not to pick it, but … You know how it goes with they who are newly out; you can’t tell them anything. There are those older in service and transition than me who counseled me not to write this epistle. Give it a few years to settle, Paul, they advised me; just because you have a testosterone prescription and a new sense of exhilaration doesn’t mean you have to go around setting down your life story, maybe save the memoir for next year. Nuts to them.) Kindly do not give my regards to Phygelus and Hermogenes, and be sure to write back and let me know if they’ve registered the snub.
Anyhow, just a few reminders about your transition: be strong. If you hear people say nice things about me, as always, please feel free to pass that information along!! Be prepared to hear a great deal of unsolicited nonsense from all corners. Remember that we live together in the body of Christ first, then in the body of believers, then in the body individual; all are necessary. Deny none of them.
Remind the people that there’s nothing wrong with having a set limit to how much time you want to dedicate as a community to wrangling over the specificities of language. Obviously you’re all going to do some wrangling. I’m not saying no wrangling, I’m just saying maybe sometimes it will help to ask yourselves: Does this directly address material reality that isn’t currently being served by preexistin
g language? And if the answer is “Not really,” maybe you can all agree to move on. And if you must fight, assume that you both wish to do well, unless it’s with an absolute human canker like Hymenaeus and Philetus, in which case do whatever you have to do, because I wouldn’t believe them if they told me their own names.
Understand that the remedy to difficult times can be found in me: my teachings, my way of life, my purpose, my faith, my love, everything that happened to me, etc. And I could write a whole list of everyone who is making the times difficult, the boastful, the arrogant, the treacherous, the ones who chase recklessly after pleasure and call it restoration, everyone who wants to blame trans men generally and me specifically for the fact that they can’t find a butch date in Antioch or Lystra, but you know who everybody is already, because nobody’s half as good at concealing their worst impulse as they think they are. I know I sound difficult. Exacting. Petty, or pettish. Defensive. I’m sorry. It’s been a long ministry, and I miss Lois, and I wish I hadn’t fought so much with Phygelus, and I just don’t want to see you make the same mistakes I made. Watch, and endure. Resist fables. Hold out for proof. God, I’m ready to sit down.
When it comes to my upcoming travel plans: You know how it is. Demas is finding himself in Thessalonica (??); Crescens is I have no idea where. It’s basically me and Luke, which is what you get when you try communal living with only a verbal agreement to fall back on. So when you come visit please bring something we can all write on to turn back to when we all hate one another. And bring me something to wear I can actually fit in, I’ve been bulking. :)
Say hello to everybody, especially Onesiphorus. Everybody in Corinth says hi, even Claudia, who I didn’t even think liked you. Now I must be about my father’s business—
Paul. (I’m thinking of just going by P. What do you think? Once I started “passing”—not that I think the language of passing is, like, tcch, obviously it’s just a certain type of shorthand and not something we should aspire to, you know what I mean—I started thinking that maybe I am more comfortable with flagging non-binary, so I’m trying out P for now, but just trying it out, thanks for witnessing this stage of my life journey.)
Paul.
INTERLUDE XIX Something Nice Happens to Oedipus
Things were fine in Thebes. Laius was the king of Thebes and had a son with the princess Jocasta; the son was named Oedipus and he fulfilled things. (You know what they say about a man with swollen feet.) There were some allegations against Laius, but I wasn’t there, and anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t really that bad. People made the curse out to be a bigger deal than it was. But there was a curse on Laius. The curse was Daddy Issues. Only a daddy can have Daddy Issues.
The Daddy Issues of Laius include:
insisting on taking your children hiking even after they start crying
ignoring the collective good and stiffing oracles, who depend on tips
refusing to save the city
letting four attendants take the hit
failing to bring a vehicle to a complete stop before proceeding into the intersection
Anyhow, the baby was a boy, so the king called a local shepherd to him and bade him carry the child to a lonely hill called Mount Cithaeron and leave him there. “Nail his feet to the mountain if you have to.” A decision admittedly based on fear. But you can’t base your happiness on someone else’s behavior, and the baby Oedipus was found and carried to the palace of King Polybus of Corinth, whose Queen Merope had no child of her own and resolved to adopt the foundling, so everything ended up working out. A happy childhood is only ever a mountain and a set of nails away.
The boy grew up believing himself the true-born son of Corinth, until one day a drunk, banquet-roistered, said, “No, not quite.” The young prince went to Delphi, tipped the oracle, and got a vague answer: “Shake hands with your father, have lunch with your mother. Don’t overextend yourself.”
Thinking this decree referred to Polybus and Merope, Oedipus left Corinth. There was no rush; he’d lunched with them both before. Quite nice lunches, too. They had sex with each other, Polybus and Merope. The complex, whatever complex there may be, has to include Polybus and Merope if it’s going to include anyone. That’s a mother and a father, too, right there.
It happened that this journey of Oedipus’s took him to a place where two roads met. There he encountered an old man in a chariot, flanked by servants and preceded by a herald—a Bubble of Daddies. Oedipus was accustomed to being treated with deference. Good for him! The old man was also accustomed to being deferred to. (What have you grown accustomed to?) Oedipus refused to pull his chariot aside when ordered to do so by the herald, who thereupon killed one of his horses.
“Oh,” said Oedipus. “Oh, oh, oh.” A dead horse can really change your perspective on forward momentum. So he stepped out of his chariot and shook hands with the old man, the herald, and the rest of the attendants. “Please don’t worry about it,” he said when they tried to apologize about the horse. “If I change the way I look at things, the things I look at change. Please, go ahead. I’m a stranger and a guest here.” The old man was Laius, king of Thebes, and he invited the young man—one so capable of rapid-onset restraint—to return with him to the city.
The city had a monster; the monster was a Sphinx; the Sphinx asked everyone questions they didn’t know the answer to. The monster wore a woman’s face and a woman’s shoulders but stopped being a woman after that and started being something else. She had very bad posture and lived on a rock and no one knew how to talk to her. As Oedipus rightly pointed out, there are worse things than not knowing the answer to something, so everyone decided to leave her alone. Some people nail themselves to mountains and don’t come down for anything.
The king invited the young man who’d been so understanding at the crossroads out to lunch. None of them thought much of it afterward, and nobody had sex.
Maybe the king and queen did; I don’t know. They were married to each other, and it’s none of our business.
(It’s weird that you would even ask about this. Other people don’t think about these things. Why are you like this?)
Later it came out they were all related. As the details couldn’t possibly affect you and your life, there’s no need to trot them all out.
So everything ended up working out pretty well, all things considered. It just goes to show that sometimes perfectly nice things can happen at a crossroads, especially if you’re polite and willing to listen, and don’t get too bent out of shape if something happens to your horse. Everyone still died, but much later, and not too unpleasantly, except for the horse.
CHAPTER 21 Destry Rides Again, or Jimmy Stewart Has a Body and So Do I
There’s something truly wonderful about referring to a procedure as specific as a bilateral mastectomy with a term as blandly ominous as “top surgery.”
Is it serious, Doc?
Yeah, son. I’m afraid there’s nothing to do but schedule you for top surgery.
What parts of me will be affected, Doc?
The top.
What are you gonna do to the top of me?
Surgery. We’re going in and we’re gonna have to surger your Top.
“Just get rid of the whole thing, Doctor,” I imagined myself saying generously, swinging my legs from the examination table. “Take the whole top off. I want my neighbors to have a clear view to the sea. Give it away to those deserving unfortunates who may have no top to speak of. I’ll get by just fine with a bottom and a middle. No top for me—I’ll get by.”
One thinks of it less as a removal than as an installation, or having one thing hauled away to make room for something else, the more time passes. In the months and years since I had/underwent/experienced/paid for/submitted to/achieved top surgery at a clinic in Plano, Texas, I’ve been able to experience something physically that I had previously only had scope to imagine. There is, as I had suspected but did not know until I had done it, a great deal of difference between imagining one’s chest w
ithout something and encountering a wholly new physical plane. I had been very anxious in the months leading up to the surgery itself, often stopping to ask myself if I wanted to postpone or even cancel the appointment altogether. Without making claims on what I may or may not feel about my body in the future, I can say that doubt and uncertainty seemed to leave me the day I exchanged imagination for experience. Now that I have a new kind of embodied knowledge about my own chest I might sometimes experience wistfulness, or a sense of poignancy, or curiosity about various alternatives, but it is not a chest I feel uncertain about any longer.
“Yes, of course not, you cut the uncertainty off,” might be the reply if this were part of a vaudeville routine, which it isn’t.
But at any rate, I’ve developed a different sort of relationship to uncertainty, one where I no longer consider avoiding change to be the highest good. I may have various changing thoughts and opinions and reactions to myself—my body, my future, my past, the things I want, the things I fear, the things I want to want—but having tested one uncertain theory, I flinch less at the prospect of others. It’s a new chest for me, rather than simply an altered or a pared-down version of my old one, and I’ve had a new chest before, so even in the newness there is a kind of familiarity. The first new chest was given to me by my endocrine system (I assume; I’m no expert, and it may be that the endocrine system is simply an old superstition designed to scare children) around the age of twelve, and I accepted it then with relatively good humor and a sense of resignation. I accepted the second at thirty-one with great joy and a number of bookmarked tabs about changing surgical dressings.
Something That May Shock and Discredit You Page 19